Quotes about Independence

A free people ought...to be armed.

A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.

Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.

Give me the liberty to know, to think, to believe, and to utter freely according to conscience, above all other liberties.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying "Amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive.

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.

To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together-humble dependence and manly independence; humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.

Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.

'Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world - as far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it.

The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time, it is not. It is my bussines, mine alone. 'This place being what?' 'This place being South Africa

People don't divide themselves on important and unimportant... I have my own life, important to me equally as is yours to you, and in my life I the one who decides.

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.